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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
With "Star Wars," everything had changed overnight. The golden age of Italian space opera would admittedly be brief; it would rapidly become more cost-effective to set sci-fi in the post-World War III wastelands of "Mad Max" and "Escape From New York" than in a galaxy far, far away. "You could just get a few broken cars," as Cozzi says. Some of the results of this next trend included "Yor, the Hunter From the Future" (1981), and the 1983 movies "After the Fall of New York" and "Exterminators of the Year 3000," which depicts 31st-century life as dominated by savage gang leaders and early '80s Oldsmobiles.
But Cozzi, who'd grown up with fantasy movies of the '50s and '60s, would not be the only Italian director to create galactic epics on a shoestring. Others included Alfonso Brescia and Aldo Lado, who was now going by the somewhat misleading pseudonym "George Lewis."
By 1980, Brescia alone had released "La Guerra dei Robot," "Beast in Space," "Captive Planet" and "Sette Uomini d'Oro" ("Seven Men of Gold in Space.") Then there was Lado's "The Humanoid," which begins with the tilted, yellow words "Directed by George Lewis," scrolling into a starry backdrop, but blinking and hiccuping as if someone is having trouble cranking the credits machine.
One day in the late '70s, French film producer Patrick Wachsberger ("Vanilla Sky") got on the phone with composer John Barry. Wachsberger wanted the creator of the Bond theme to add John Williams-style grace to the picture he was shooting in Rome. "I've got the biggest fucking science-fiction movie ever," Wachsberger remembers telling him.
There was just one flaw in his argument: The movie in question was "Starcrash." The special effects budget was rumored to be in the five digits, and a wave of trepidation hit Wachsberger: What if Barry saw the tacky spacecraft, the ludicrous acting or the lumbering stop-motion giantess with nipples before signing the deal to write the music? Wachsberger says he decided to show the composer dirty black-and-white prints, and claim the effects weren't actually finished yet.
Barry did score the movie, and when "Starcrash" was forgotten, he would recycle the main theme into "Out of Africa," making it a little less jaunty and winning an Oscar for his trouble.
Anyone loosely throwing around the term "B-movie" to describe the appeal of "Star Wars" has yet to see "Starcrash," which in a just world would be a midnight tradition at every college campus. It's a very, very loosely connected series of cliffhangers, not unlike the early movie serials Lucas has cited as inspiration. Heroine Stella Star swims through space, is kidnapped by troglodytes and is turned into a human popsicle on an ice planet, only to revive with makeup fully intact. She responds to each of Cozzi's loony plot twists with the same sultry look at the camera.
And the script is as quotable as that of "Plan 9 From Outer Space." After Stella Star reaches the illogical conclusion that her sidekick (ex-evangelist Marjoe Gortner, as a Mork-ish space mystic) can see into the future, he cheerily reveals: "You would have changed the future, which is against the law. I can therefore tell you nothing."
In "Starcrash," a claw-shaped spaceship is the target of Death Star-like bombing runs. It's then boarded by people hiding in torpedoes, which crash through plate glass windows, causing no decompression whatsoever. The space marines in Renaissance-influenced helmets hop out of the coffins, laser rifles at the ready.
"Starcrash," as far as its imported American cast knew, "was going to be this wonderful sci-fi picture," in the words of actor Judd Hamilton, who plays the robot. "Star Wars" had been released three months before shooting started, and the film world was delirious with space fever.
The innocents abroad took in the lush Italian scenery, when not avoiding brawls with local ruffians and angry tourists atop Mt. Etna. There was even a rumor Wachsberger might arrange for an audience with Pope John Paul I. Hamilton stayed in apartments overlooking the Forum with then-wife Munro, Gortner and Hasselhoff, who was then a young soap actor. Plummer was reportedly on the set for just two days, during which he delivered perhaps the most shocking deus ex machina in the history of drama: His character saves the heroes from a time bomb with the command, "Imperial battleship, stop the flow of time!"
